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A PAINTING'S SECRET.(The Talk of the Town)(secret behind painting of black mariner from 1700s)
In 1783, to mark his retirement from the Continental Army, George Washington held a farewell dinner at the Fraunces Tavern, on Pearl Street. Earlier in the war, a crew including a number of skilled black sailors had saved Washington's life by evacuating him to Manhattan during the disastrous Battle of Brooklyn, but they weren't invited to the party. So, when the Fraunces Tavern Museum began organizing "Fighting for Freedom: Black Patriots and Loyalists," it seemed only right that the era's best-known portrait of a black mariner should hang as the exhibition's centerpiece.
"I was so thrilled to show the painting. It's in just about every book on AfricanAmerican history," Nadezhda Williams, the curator of the show, which runs through July, said. "There are only a few images from this period of AfricanAmericans in uniform, and they tend to be generic. This painting was different--an individualistic portrait of what might be a real African-American Revolutionary War veteran."
The painting features a sailor, standing in front of a clipper ship. He is wearing a blue officer's coat and a shirt open to his solar plexus. Dr. Alexander McBurney, a retired Rhode Island urologist, bought the painting for thirteen hundred dollars from an art dealer in 1975, in a fit of bicentennial fever. "Just looking at other people's ancestors doesn't appeal to me at all," McBurney said. "But this is special." Though its provenance is unknown, the painting has been featured in textbooks and television programs and displayed at museums. After agreeing, last June, to lend it to the Fraunces, McBurney decided to get the sailor cleaned up for his New York debut.
Art restoration projects always entail risk, and the sailor was assessed, for insurance purposes, at up to three hundred thousand dollars. McBurney sent him to Boston's Peter Williams (no relation to Nadezhda Williams), who has a special interest in maritime subjects. He had no idea that his beloved sailor would turn out to be harboring a secret.
"We tried to clean a section of the painting, what would be the sitter's left hand," Williams said. "We applied solvent ...
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